The FBI Files - Netflix

Through re-enactments of high profile cases involving the FBI, the show
reveals how agents solve these crimes behind the scene. The show
producers work with FBI special agents and examiners in high tech crime
labs to portrait each case accurately. You will learn how the FBI
protects the lives of Americans and brings the most notorious criminals
to justice. The FBI was originally established to address crime that
covered cities, counties, and spread across state lines. The country
needed a federal law-enforcement entity to do those investigations. And
over the years, as the country has grown and as the world, by the same
token, has grown smaller, the FBI's mission has changed to meet the
various threats.

Type: Documentary

Languages: English

Status: Ended

Runtime: 60 minutes

Premier: 1998-10-20

The FBI Files - FBI Silvermaster File - Netflix

The Silvermaster File of the United States' Federal Bureau of
Investigation is a 162-volume compendium of some 26,000 pages of
documents relating to the Bureau's investigation of Communist
penetration of the U.S. federal government during the Cold War.
Beginning in 1945 with the allegations of defecting Soviet courier
Elizabeth Bentley (Venona cover names “Myrna”; Umnitsa, “Clever Girl”),
the file is also known as the Bentley file or Gregory file (“Gregory”
was the FBI code name for Bentley). The file takes its name from Nathan
Gregory Silvermaster (Venona cover names Pel, Pal, “Paul”; “Robert”) of
the War Production Board, whom Bentley named as head of an underground
Communist network known as the Silvermaster Group. Among the people
named in the file in connection with this group are President Franklin
Roosevelt's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie (Venona cover name
“Page”) and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White
(Venona cover names “Lawyer”; “Jurist”; “Richard”). Also named in the
file are Victor Perlo (Venona cover name “Raider”), chief of the
Aviation Section of the War Production Board, and contacts of his Perlo
group, including Alger Hiss (Venona cover name “Ales”), secretary
general of the United Nations Charter Conference. (Like several others
identified by Bentley, Hiss had been identified independently by another
defecting Soviet courier, Whittaker Chambers, to Assistant Secretary of
State Adolf Berle in 1939.) Among dozens of others named by Bentley in
this file in connection with this network is Duncan Lee (Venona cover
name “Koch”), confidential assistant to William Donovan, founder and
director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wartime predecessor
of the CIA.

The FBI Files - Prosecutions - Netflix

Original plans for Bentley to serve as a double agent and gather
sufficient evidence to prosecute the Soviet agents identified in the
Silvermaster files were ruined when her identity was inadvertently
leaked and the USSR quickly shut down its operations in order to avoid
embarrassing and damaging prosecutions. The Silvermaster file in
combination with other secret proofs such as the Venona intercepts gave
US intelligence the identity of many Soviet agents without the practical
means to secure convictions. Also, the statute of limitations for an
espionage prosecution was quite short. This was a significant part of
the backstory of McCarthyism. Bentley's double agent career would have
enabled the US to expose the spies without compromising Venona and
losing that as an ongoing intelligence source.